Transfusions and iron-chelation therapy have dramatically improved the lives of patients with thalassemia major.¹ Transfusions can prevent death and promote normal development, but the iron in the transfused red cells accumulates and eventually damages ...

Approximately 10 percent of cases of invasive epithelial ovarian cancer are hereditary, occurring predominantly in women with germ-line mutations in the BRCA1 or the BRCA2 gene (unpublished data). The lifetime risk of ovarian cancer is approximately 45 ...

Noninvasive positive-pressure ventilation is a safe and effective means of improving gas exchange in patients with many types of acute respiratory failure.¹ For example, in patients with acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and ...

Acute coronary syndromes, including acute myocardial infarction and unstable angina, result from the disruption of atherosclerotic plaque, leading to intracoronary thrombus formation with aggregated platelets within a fibrin mesh.¹ Standard therapy ...

Human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) is a recently discovered virus that appears to have a pathogenic role in Kaposi's sarcoma, multicentric Castleman's disease, and primary-effusion lymphoma, a distinctive lymphoma that arises within body-cavity effusions.¹–⁷ HHV-...

Figure 1. A solitary angiomatous nodule (verruga peruana) was found on the forearm of a 24-year-old resident of the Peruvian Andes. Bartonella bacilliformis, which is transmitted by sandflies, was isolated from the lesion. The patient had no other ...

A low serum potassium concentration is perhaps the most common electrolyte abnormality encountered in clinical practice. When defined as a value of less than 3.6 mmol of potassium per liter, hypokalemia is found in over 20 percent of hospitalized ...

Presentation of Case

A 34-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of worsening dyspnea and increasing mitral regurgitation after replacement of the aortic valve for acute bacterial endocarditis.

The patient had a history of intravenous drug ...

Red-cell transfusion therapy in patients with homozygous β-thalassemia (thalassemia major) decreases the complications of severe anemia and prolongs survival.¹ However, the effectiveness of transfusions is limited by the tissue damage resulting from iron ...

Ovarian cancer is an insidious disease that kills more American women each year than all other gynecologic cancers combined. It causes no specific symptoms even when the disease is advanced, there are no effective screening tests, and risk factors for ...

New molecular techniques have yielded a battery of potential therapies for many diseases, but the clinical fruits of these methods have not been abundant, in part because in vitro models used for screening often do not duplicate in vivo conditions. For ...

To the Editor: In Table 2 of the article by Malinow et al. (April 9 issue),¹ the group that received the lowest level of folate supplementation (group A) appeared to have lower homocyst(e)ine values than group B or C. Although the authors state that ...

To the Editor: The review article “Homocysteine and Atherothrombosis” by Welch and Loscalzo (April 9 issue)¹ was very interesting, and it conclusively showed that elevated homocysteine levels are indeed a risk factor for vascular disease. However, the ...

To the Editor: Bowers et al. (April 2 issue)¹ report that complete reperfusion of the right coronary artery by angioplasty resulted in significant improvement of right ventricular function and outcome. We were not surprised by the fact that among 165 ...

To the Editor: We report two cases in which the appearance of the esophageal mucosa and histologic abnormalities in the esophagus were indicative of reversible thermal injury.

A 66-year-old man with a history of coronary artery disease presented to the ...

To the Editor: The concept of a compression of morbidity has implications for health care policies and costs and for the quality of people's lives. If morbidity can indeed be compressed into fewer years toward the end of a hypothetical “full life span,” ...

To the Editor: We recently noted a relation between obesity, which is a risk factor for various diseases, and periodontitis, which is a major cause of tooth loss in adults. We studied 241 apparently healthy dentulous Japanese subjects, 20 to 59 years of ...

The clinical-practice guidelines for the management of acute low back pain that were published in 1994 by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) are widely recognized to have been a watershed. On the one hand, they marked an important ...

Not long ago, I overheard a distinguished cardiologist lamenting in private that brain infarcts would be a far less serious problem if neurologists could only get out of bed at a moment's notice to insert an arterial catheter into a patient. Alas, the ...

Neuroimmunology, a well-recognized subspecialty of neurology, deals with disorders with an immune-mediated component. This field has expanded tremendously in recent years. Unexpected immunologic features are being discovered in conditions as varied as ...